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dog BEHAVIOUR

Dogs have different behaviours for different situations, and learn these behaviours based on their experiences. This makes understanding and helping dog behaviour much more complicated.

UNDERSTANDING YOUR DOG

What makes a dog man’s best friend is how well they seem to understand us. But do we always understand them? Dogs communicate with us all the time but without words or conversation. Instead, they use body language, facial expressions and some vocalisations to let us know what they feel and think. Being able to pick up on these signals will ultimately improve your relationship. The first step in improving dog to people communication is to make sure your puppy receives appropriate and adequate socialisation in the proper manner and at the proper time.

HOW DO DOGS “TALK TO US”?

Dog-human communication

Dogs are social animals that often live in groups and evolved a nuanced but effective method of non-verbal communication with each other to create a harmonious group. To make living together more effective, dogs remember and learn about each group member and work to avoid conflicts by being predictable and following the canine social rules.

While living as family pets, dogs still expect clear signals from the humans that make up their social group. While people strive for predictability in verbal cues and actions, for dogs predictability relies on routine and consistent responses in social interactions. Predictability makes things clearer, and change and inconsistency on a regular basis can create anxiety. While some have described unwanted responses in dogs as “behaving as a leader” or being a “dominant dog”, a dog is usually just confused about what you want or the outcome of the social interaction. Often, anxiety and insecurity can lead to growling, baring its teeth or snapping if the dog becomes very frightened, threatened or punished.

Dogs also need their owners to establish clear rules of communication and then to be consistent in rewarding desirable behaviors: a specific behavior displayed by the dog in one context should always be either rewarded, or conversely ignored and be consistent from time to time, and place to place. Otherwise, such ambiguity creates confusion and can lead to unwanted behaviors in dogs.

Dog’s sensory world

Dogs use sophisticated ways of communication with other dogs, using:

Vocalisations and sounds - A dog’s hearing is about 4 times more acute than human’s, leading dogs to react to sounds that human cannot even hear. This can lead to misunderstanding of some dog’s reactions and behavior

Pheromones - These are species-specific, as are all pheromones, thus imperceptible by humans

Smells - A dog’s sense of smell is known to be more than 1000 times more sensitive than in humans, making dogs react to signals that are imperceptible to humans

Visual signals - Without words, dogs use body postures, ears, mouth, eyes and tail to communicate their feelings. However, humans focus on words and do not intuitively know how to interpret canine signals.

Canine Social communication

Social communication is a two-way street. Dogs need to be able to understand the signals from humans and be able to predict them, and in return expect their social signals to be understood as well. But without words, some canine social signals are very subtle.

Turning the head away and not allowing eye contact (see above photo) ,

Licking the lips,

Wrinkling the forehead

Are all signs that the dog is uncomfortable with what is happening. Rather than going forward and trying to make the dog comply, it is usually better to take a step or two away and give the dog time to relax and then ask again or change the way you ask so that it is clearer and non-threatening to the dog.

Another common canine body posture is one that is often called the “guilty” look. In this instance the dog may take the avoidance to the extreme and show behaviours such as, averting their eyes, lowering their body and licking their lips. The dog is actually not guilty, but in dog language, it says “I see you are angry-please don’t hurt me”. Our mistake is assuming they know WHY we are angry because we have told them so with our words, but since they don’t usually understand those, all they hear is our angry tone and all they see is our tense and angry body.

When your dog does not react as expected to your verbal cues, remember that instead of being disobedient they may not understand what you want them to do, or they are anxious and frightened so cannot concentrate or are distracted by something they deem more important. Additionally, some things that are very important to people, are unimportant to dogs and they need to be taught how they should respond.

Just like people, if a dog is misunderstood, or frustrated that their needs are not met, as confused or anxious because of unclear human-dog communication they, can become stressed.

STRESSFUL SITUATIONS FOR DOGS

In addition to the above social situations which can cause stress, there are several contexts also known to be potentially stressful for dogs: